Just speculating here............with regard to the original 787 battery design.
Probably the easiest way to overstress a battery cell, without this being detected by the battery monitoring unit would be to lose the electrical contact with one of the plate sets within the battery cell itself.
Seems to me that this would force the remainder of the cell to attempt to carry the load or to accept the charge being applied to the rest of the battery cells during charging.
Basically the same effect as substituting a lesser capacity battery cell in series with the remainder of the battery cells. No way to avoid abusing the 'smaller' cell with the original design if that happened.
Has this been discussed elsewhere?
